A 50-year career came only after a number of, well, digressions

GRACE KELLY WAS off someplace exotic, honeymooning with Prince Rainier, and Richard Nixon had just taken a two-week hiatus from his Presidential campaign to enter a hospital with a knee infection.

The Dallas Cowboys were in their first NFL pre-season ever and the American Football League was looking forward to its maiden campaign. The New York Yankees and Pittsburgh Pirates were leading their respective American and National leagues, both of which consisted of eight teams.

Nixon would be off the stump for two weeks, but why worry? Despite John F. Kennedy’s charm, the country is not about to elect a Catholic to the most powerful job on earth.

Closer to home, the Red Raiders and their fans were agog over the approach of their first ever Southwest Conference football season, and there was talk about a loop that would encircle the entire city, residential areas and all. That, however, was a few years away, and I had my head full just dealing with today ... that day.

It was a hot August afternoon, and I had just paused at the top of the stairs to take in the surroundings, hoping to get all those butterflies flying in formation before I stepped on in to begin a new job in a new profession in a new town.

IT WAS TWO flights of stairs that got me to the spot where I was standing; but it was a long, winding road, often filled with bumps, curves and detours, that had brought me there. I don’t know whether I did, but I could have uttered under my breath, “After all these years it is really going to happen ...”

Back in Moran Grade School, it was Miss Baughman who asked the boys in the class what they wanted to be when they grew up. That the girls were not asked the same question says more about the times than it does about the teacher who had posed the question.

And that the girls themselves were not offended was because they had not yet been taught that they should be.

But I digress.

Carl planned to be a mechanic. Jack said he would be a truck driver. Cuz wanted to be a carpenter.

Miss Baughman nodded politely after each of those responses, perhaps even commenting that the country, then at war, needed mechanics, truck drivers and carpenters.

It was when I said I was going to someday be a writer for a newspaper that her tempo changed.

She stared at me awhile, trying to figure out where I was coming from. For all her good qualities, Miss Baughman always had a feeling that I was up to something. She didn’t say “Posh!” but I could feel her thinking it.

“You would have to go to college to do that,” she said, then went right on back to whichever of the Three Rs that were the original topic.

I did not take her remark personal at the time, nor do I now.

Moran boys didn’t go the college. They became mechanics, truck drivers and carpenters.

WHAT MISS Baughman had no way of knowing was that I had not simply blurted a quick answer to a simple question. Rather, I had bared a long-harbored dream that she had taken as an impulsive fantasy.

Even though there was nothing impulsive about my response, the time would come when I, too, would accept it as just a fantasy. But not yet at that juncture.

The school years rolled on, the war ended and I had moved on up to high school.

Meanwhile, I would read the Fort Worth Star-Telegram every day, cover to cover, wondering what it was like for those people who wrote the stories. I envied what I figured to be their lifestyles — especially the sports writers who got to speak daily with such college stars as Doak Walker and ballplayers like Ted Williams and Bob Feller.

It wasn’t that most of my friends didn’t take my dream seriously; they simply didn’t know enough about the subject to even wonder if I could do it.

Then came Marguerite Haggard, who not only knew exactly what I was talking about but was excited by the thought.

Miss Haggard was our new high school English teacher and, of greater import to me, a former newspaper journalist. Although I’m sure she often wished that I was as interested in serious matters as I was in football, girls and mayhem, she never stopped encouraging, urging and coaching.

In my senior yearbook she wrote a nice note, saying I had “a fantastic flair for writing,” and how she expected great things for me.

It was Miss Haggard who convinced me I could do it. My problem was deciding that I would do it.

SEPARATING THAT high school graduation day, when Miss Haggard told me she also was leaving MHS, and the day at the top of the aforementioned stairs, a lot more things than passing time breezed through my life.

With Miss Haggard’s prodding no longer available, my aspirations lapsed back into the reality of my surroundings. College would mean — despite my scholarship offers — financial hardship for my folks (who, unbeknownst to me, were very eager to make it) and a rather pedestrian, literally, lifestyle for myself. My friends had taken roughnecking jobs and actually had bought their own cars! Hey, no guy’s charm could persuade a chick to go to a movie if it meant walking to the bleeping theater!

I tucked the dream away, decided it wasn’t my lot to begin with, and took my life down a different route. After stints in the West Texas oilfields and highway construction, I was drafted and spent two years in the Army.

Shortly after my discharge I met a pretty co-ed, fell in love and — only after my having agreed to join her in pursuit of a college degree — we eloped.

Encouraged by her persuasion, financed by the GI Bill, and motivated by the need to get out of there and get a job, I completed my bachelor of journalism degree in two years and 11 months.

Sorting through several job offers that came as a result of that J-school’s reputation, I told my wife that I thought we should go to Lubbock, where they wanted me to write sports.

“Lubbock?” she said, sounding reluctant. “That’s way out in West Texas ...”

“Listen, it’s a very good newspaper and a chance to cover the Southwest Conference. And we’ll probably just stay there for a year, two at the most.”

WHILE STANDING at the top of the stairs that day, my thoughts could have reflected on those two schoolteachers — Miss Baughman and Miss Haggard — and how both, quite paradoxically, had accurately assessed my aspirations.

Not much happened during the years since both those amazing women passed through my life that the both of them did not somehow affect. Miss Baughman’s dogmatic pragmatism and Miss Haggard’s unspoken permission to dream and to aspire were permanent residents of my psyche.

Today, the 50th Anniversary of my walking up those stairs, I knew I was allowing a boyhood dream to culminate.

But I had no idea that the company I was about to join and the town I had just moved to would become more than merely an occupation and a place of residence.

Both institutions would come to define me. It took a while for me to do that for myself ...

BURLE PETTIT is editor emeritus of The Lubbock Avalanche-Journal. E-mail: burlepettit@sbcglobal.net with the word “column” in the subject line.

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